On the substance, Deroy Murdock makes two points that I wish his National Review colleagues will notice. First, he includes interest income in his definition of the Social Security surplus: In fiscal year 2005, for instance, the Social Security system will collect $496.7 billion in payroll taxes, $14 billion in taxation of benefits, and $83.6 […]

Here’s the highlight reel from Greenspan’s testimony before Congress today. First, some comments about the state of the economy thus far in 2005: In mid-February, when I presented our last report to the Congress, the economy, supported by strong underlying fundamentals, appeared to be on a solid growth path, and those circumstances prevailed through March. […]

I think that it’s generally worth keeping one eye on long-term interest rates for indications of market expectations and behaviors. And over the past couple of weeks, this indicator has shown some interesting movement: long-term rates have made a decisive, if not dramatic, move upward. The 10-year yield has gone from about 3.95% to about […]

Paul Krugman has read the paper by Katharine Bradbury and provides this summary of the debate: Some background: the unemployment rate is only one of several numbers economists use to assess the jobs picture. When the economy is generating an abundance of jobs, economists expect to see strong growth in the payrolls reported by employers […]

My hope in this post was to stimulate further debate as to what Martin Wolk had written about Ben Bernanke’s claim about a relationship between job growth and housing price increases. CalculatedRisk read the data in the same way that Wolk read it, while James Hamilton ran a regression with employment growth as the explanatory […]

Mark Thoma reads Kevin Hassett so we don’t have to. Mark notes: I disagree with his demonstration that tax cuts paid for themselves and that therefore the deficit is attributable solely to spending, not to tax cuts. Let’s take a look at what Hassett wrote: Let’s tune out the chatter for a minute and just […]

Irwin Kellner of Marketwatch picks up on the question that I posed last week of how inflation in house prices affects official inflation data. He takes the reasoning that I suggested — that when house prices and rents diverge, the CPI may not give as good a picture of the cost-of-living as we would like […]

Even as David Corn mocks Cliff May, Mark Levin blames Valerie Plame. Rather than blaming the victim, Andrew McCarthy blames her employer. Since Levin and McCarthy were likely paid by the National Review for their stupidity, let’s blame their employer for such pathetic nonsense.

I guess Mr. May is the class clown over at the National Review. You may recall that his first excuse for the 7/14/2003 column by Robert Novak was the premise that it was common knowledge that Valerie Plame was a CIA agent. But now Mr. May claims we could not have known that she was […]

Martin Wolk attributes the following alleged correlation to Ben Bernanke: For example, states exhibiting higher rates of job growth also tend to have experienced greater appreciation in house prices. The AP story on Bernanke’s comments can be found here. Wolk argues that job growth alone cannot explain housing appreciation adding that other fundamental factors may […]